Page:A History of Banking in the United States.djvu/23



PERIOD I. 1630 TO 1780.

The Colonists Experiment with Joint Stock Banks of Issue on Land Security, and with Provincial Mortgage Loan Offices Issuing Currency.

CHAPTER I.

HE term "bank" was used in the American colonies from the very beginning of the settlement, in the sense of a pile or heap. In a report made to the Massachusetts General Court, in 1652, reference is made to the fact that some people have been discussing a project for raising a bank, or engaging in general trade, and have been pondering on the badness of money and its fluctuations, and other things relating to the regulation of trade. The hope is expressed that these ponderings will bear fruit and that things will be "reduced to a more comfortable state than we now find." In the draft of an address to Charles II, in 1684, mention is made of the fact that before the establishment of the mint, in 1652, "for some years paper bills passed for payment of debts." Correspondence between Governor Winthrop of Connecticut and Hartlib is cited, about 1660, in which a "bank of lands and commodities" is under discussion. It is referred to as "a way of trade and bank without money," and Winthrop was confident that this bank would "answer all those ends that are attained in other parts of the world by banks of ready money."

This endeavor, which we here meet with in the very earliest days of the settlement, to invent some kind of a bank on land, which could be made to work like the banks founded on money, is most interesting and important